Our Business

Making sharing the key focus for StatPro was the main theme for us in 2013; this is our unique selling point.

Internally, we realigned teams to be global rather than regional, hired and trained new staff to ensure that we can capitalise on the opportunity that our new products offer us. Externally, we widened our network of partners for StatPro Revolution through fund administrators and platform providers (see more from page 20 onwards in the Operational Review). We also launched a beta version of StatPro R+ (cloud-based replacement for StatPro Seven). We improved communication with our partners through a dedicated handbook and we conducted a series of events to communicate with our existing clients about the forthcoming release of StatPro R+.

Through better communication and sharing we were able to assist our partners and clients to increase their sales, improve client service, meet regulations and reduce their costs. This has increased both StatPro Revolution revenue and the potential market.

Sharing

The key value proposition of StatPro Revolution is its ability to share access to any portfolio with anyone, anywhere. We do not charge for users, so our clients can share at will. This creates a new self-service approach to client reporting that will truly revolutionise the asset management market, just like internet banking revolutionised the retail banking market.

We believe every portfolio is a network: someone owns it, someone provides advice on it, someone manages it, someone checks it complies with regulations, someone tries to ensure it is profitable, someone is concerned about the risk. All these people have an active interest in knowing what is going on in that portfolio at any given time. StatPro Revolution manages this effortlessly.

Sharing our expertise with clients and partners is important, because if we can communicate how best to sell our products, our partners can actively sell on our behalf, generating a snowball effect, leading to more clients and additional sales.

In 2013, we hired 13 new sales people for our London, Boston, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Cape Town and Paris offices. After attending one of two 12-week courses in the UK, they returned to their teams armed with a wealth of knowledge to sell StatPro Revolution. This sales training process has proved extremely useful in getting relatively inexperienced people up to scratch very quickly and making sales. We also completed the partner handbook and delivered several training courses and joint events with partners and fund administrators who, as part of our own network, can support our sales goals. Further information about this can be found in the Operational Review from page 20.

Reviewing the performance function

Since the replacement of StatPro Seven by StatPro R+ began, we have not only rewritten all our analytical software from scratch, but we have also redesigned the workflow to be more efficient. Performance analysis software has in the past been built around the structure of traditional performance teams, but with the advent of new technology, the way performance analysis is provided can be changed and, in addition, the organisation of performance teams can also be changed and this needs to be reflected in the new software.

Without performance and risk analysis, the asset managers cannot communicate appropriately with their clients nor control risk effectively. It is often the case that many people are complacent about performance and risk right up to the moment when something dramatic happens in the market, at which point they need a complete understanding of what is happening and more importantly need to communicate this understanding immediately with their clients. But putting a modern performance process in place is a complex and expensive operation so companies must plan ahead. We think this means that outsourcing will become increasingly popular, but outsourcing will not work unless the service offered is responsive, flexible and sophisticated.

StatPro R+ has been designed to address this requirement and we will be targeting the outsourcers with it. Built from scratch, it reengineers the portfolio performance process to maximise scale, frequency and speed and minimise errors.